Hello! It’s been yet another eventful week with the WBL team. This week, I was officially onboarded to the Labor survey team. I met with the topic team lead (the project manager overseeing the team) and also my new teammates on the project, which was really exciting. I also learned a bit more about my tasks for the next few weeks.
The Labor Law Team
As mentioned last week, the labor team is one of the topic teams within WBL (along with implementation, violence against women, family law, childcare, etc.) that collects and analyzes data on a specific aspect of women’s law. In this case, as the name suggest, the labor law analyzes existing labor law across the WBL’s 190 economies, to better understand which are the laws that affect a woman’s decision to enter, stay in, or leave the workforce.
To this, the labor team administers a survey to legal experts across these economies to capture data on labor reforms across:
Maternity, paternity, and parental leave for private sector employees (for example, a chance in the number of days of leave or percentage of wages paid for any leave period).
Workplace protections (for example, new laws prohibiting the dismissal of pregnant workers, laws mandating nondiscrimination based on gender in employment of laws mandating equal remuneration for work of equal value, or sexual harassment in employment/workplaces).
Legal restrictions on women’s employment (for example, the removal of a provision prohibiting women from working in certain jobs)
The ages of women and men can retire and receive pension benefits (for example, the equalization of the retirement age for men and women).
My Role
I will be supporting the team with data collection, specifically administering the survey to legal experts within and outside the WBL’s network. I will then be analyzing the data captured from the survey (time permitting) to identify key trends and themes that emerge. This is a critical component of the WBL methodology and I am thrilled to be able to move this work forward.